


Rise and Shine

by ATLenya



Series: Body of Truth [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: F/M, FTM!Steve, Gen, Implied/Referenced Bullying, Implied/Referenced Homophobia, Implied/Referenced Transphobia, Original Male Character - Freeform, Period Typical Attitudes, Trans Male Character, part of a series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-10
Updated: 2014-07-10
Packaged: 2018-02-08 06:35:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,740
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1930359
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ATLenya/pseuds/ATLenya
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve Rogers wakes up 60 years too late for a dance he promised. But some things that should have stayed buried resurface and it becomes apparent that there's a lot he needs to learn about this 21st century. Even if that means reopening some doors he'd hoped to leave closed for the rest of his life.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Rise and Shine

**Author's Note:**

> I've been nursing this series for a little over a year now. This first installment is the set up.  
> The series itself is not always in chronological order but tries to be. It will mostly be Steve-centric.
> 
> If you hadn't understood, Steve is a FtM transexual.  
> I have tried to do as much research as I can on the subject of female to male transexuality, but it's a heavy subject and I would never presume to know all that much about it. So please, if you find anything in this that needs correcting, please tell me and understand that I am not making fun of the trans community in any way shape or form with this.
> 
> Bonne Lecture :)

If this had been a flick, they would have probably spared the sensibilities of the good people by pretending that the shock of the crash knocked him unconscious and he had no time to realise what was happening as he sank to the bottom of the Antarctic. The truth was, while he felt disoriented and scared, he did feel the impact that made him fall behind the seat of the plane. His breath caught in his throat as the water hurled toward him, throwing him to the back of the plane. The cold shocked him and a frightening numbness overcame his body slowly and tantalisingly. He had time to feel himself get more and more tired and he briefly tried to fight the sleepiness but knew a useless fight when he saw one. Sure it wasn’t like him to give up so easily but images just kept flashing through his mind. Peggy smiling and the tremolo in her voice behind the crinkling of the radio, Erskine smiling gently at him as he sat in front of him in his bunk and then laying on the ground as the light of life left his eyes, a young brown haired boy with mischief in his eyes hugging a tiny frail blonde boy’s shoulder and saying that everything would be alright. And it was to those images that he finally lost consciousness.

 

* * *

 

His first waking moments after that, are a confused jumble of lights and sounds that he painstakingly tries to  make sense of. And then his mind clears, he hears the baseball chatter on the radio and his heart freezes. The next minutes are alit with running and the sheer loudness of everything outside the building he was kept in and the confusion is back with full force and fanfare. The one-eyed black man is talking to him but it’s like his mind is still sluggish from the Ice. Seventy years. He had stayed frozen for seventy years.

It’s all a bit of a blur after that. He’s taken into what looks to be this generation’s (not the one after him or even after that, but seventy years missing. Seventy years of progress, of people living and dying and he hadn’t seen it, hadn’t felt it, this couldn’t be happening.) army standard Jeep. Black and sleek, showy and with curves and lines that looked so removed from what he knew, so alien, it was unreal.

They drive for a while, the windows are tinted black and he can’t see outside, it’s a small reprieve from the confusing billboards with flashy images way more advanced than on any television set he’d seen, and all in colors. But the interior of the car is nearly as suffocating in its _difference_ as the rest of the world outside, the dashboard looks strange, with more buttons than he’d seen on anything not deemed State Secret, there’s small lights with odd signals on them that the driver navigates with ease. The ride is soundless, his guards not even looking at him and the one-eyed man (Nick Fury, director of S.H.I.E.L.D., whose great idea was it to mix super-humans and spies?) looking very comfortable keeping his silence; even the roar of the engine and its vibrations are far more muted than anything he’d experienced.

They lead him to a tall gray building with very few windows, he’s shuffled inside before he can really look at it, but it looks imposing and bare. It’s a far-cry from the secret underground bunker under an antiques shop, in the middle of Brooklyn. Once inside, he’s settled in a small room with just enough space to put a bed on one side and a desk and a chair on the other, with the water closet and shower behind a door at the back. He is put through different tests, all uncomfortable and awkward, before he sees Fury again.

 

* * *

 

The man is sitting in the chair in his quarter when he gets in after having ran an hour and a half on a treadmill for one doctor or another.

 

“How was your day, Captain Rogers?” Fury enquires, blandly.

“As well as it can go, sir.” Steve replies, shrugging slightly as he comes to stand at parade rest in front of the man who, while not having given any official military ranking, oozes presence and authority enough to make the blond man straighten his spine, if not in respect, then in suspicion.

“No need for this. Sit down. You’re an asset to SHIELD, not a prisoner.” Fury snorts, gesturing him toward the bed with a nod of his head.

 

Steve feels mildly uneasy but sits down on his bunk, wondering what other bombshells the black man has come to throw at him.

 

“What do you really want from me?” Steve asks tonelessly.

“That’s a very broad question, Helen. Do you mind if I call you Helen? I’ll do it anyway.” Fury starts, a knowing smirk stretching his lips.

 

Steve resists the urge to flinch as if someone had punched him in the gut with his own shield. Even from his own perspective, it feels like decades since the last time someone had called him by that name.

To be fair, the last time he’s heard it uttered was before the war, when Bucky and him were two snot-nosed kids trying to survive in a world of heinous words whispered at their backs and mirthless laughters following them around. “The freak and its knight in scrawny armor” was how some of their older neighbors used to call them. Refusing to let him move on with his life and taking great pleasure in calling out to him by his birth name just to see his reactions.

The name itself hadn’t bothered Steve when he was little and confused about why he didn’t feel like all those other girls on his block who’d meet up near the ice-cream truck and play house and have tea with dolls. Sure he didn’t feel right using it because it somehow never fit him, but it was bearable at first. But he’d grown to despise it and fear hearing it called. But Bucky had been there, a year younger than him and already so strong and confident.

And little by little, as the years passed, the gossips died down and the tales of the “unnatural little girl who thought she was a boy” quieted down as well. He would always be too short, too scrawny and too weak, but the stares abated as the wicked curiosity simmered. He became just another oddity in Brooklyn and he was fine with that (no he really wasn’t, but he had been realist enough to know that this was the most he’d get with his lot in life, though it didn’t stop him from trying for more, always).

His birth name was lost to most and the young haggles of children who used to follow him and call him “freak” and “monster” lost interest until all they remembered was that odd older boy Steve and his tough over-protective best-pal Bucky.

But to hear that named uttered again, so many years later, leaves Steve winded and slightly pale.

 

“What do you want…” The Captain repeats slowly and carefully, his teeth clenched and his stomach churning as he looks at the glint of triumph in Fury’s one eye.

“We are ready to set you up quietly and without a fuss, in an apartment somewhere down in Brooklyn. We will arrange everything and you’ll get some catching up material.” Fury explains, his face a mastery of blankness.

“What do you want in exchange?” Steve asks again, the sick feeling in the pit of his stomach growing worse.

“When I call on you, you will come without discussion. Technically, you services with the Army was terminated when you were declared KIA. But you have sixty years of backpay and wages left untouched since the war, that should be enough for you to settle for several lifetimes. But I want you available if the need to punch things comes up.”

“I should have realized that you’d hold no compulsion against blackmailing an ‘asset’” The temporally misplaced soldier intones, livid and yet only his training and his own determination stop him from slumping his shoulders in defeat.

“I do what needs to be done, Captain. For the good of the many. If it means blackmailing a national Icon, then so be it.” Fury responds calmly.

“You do realize that I would have gladly helped you when the time came if the situation warranted my kind of help, even without this.” Steve enquirs, trying fruitlessly to stave off the anger from his voice.

“Probably, but I need more than you word, Captain Rogers. This insures my certainty.” Fury replies noncommittally before standing up. “You will have three days on base, with a couple of agents to catch up on sixty years of human history. After that, an agent will drive you to your new home and give you your new IDs.”

“Fury?” Steve asks as the man prepares to leave the room, stopping him in his tracks. “Who else knows?”

“The two Analysts charged with keeping up researches in your history have been sworn to secrecy. Agent Hill, my 2CO knows as well and of course, whoever’s left of your old comrades that you’ve revealed it to…”

 

Fearing what he could reveal if he opened his mouth, Steve keeps quiet, glaring at the spymaster. The one-eyed man gives him one long last stare before leaving with nary a nod. Steve immediately sags against the wall, feeling more drained than he’s felt anything since waking up in the future.

He’d thought for so long that he had buried that part of his past when he’d realized the true extent of the Super Soldier Serum and its effects on his body. At last, he’d really felt like his body was really his and really whole. Not because he was finally tall and bulging muscles in the right places. But because the battery of tests that followed his transformation revealed the inner workings of super-humanly healthy male body. Down to his chromosomes. His testosterone levels had stabilized, the few ugly scars from his last operation on his external sexual organs had completely disappeared.

He was finally, through a strike of luck and strangely enough his own determination to serve his country, finally what he should have always been. And apart from Dr Erskine, Peggy, two young nurses sworn to secrecy and of course Bucky and his mom, no one should have known anymore. Dr Erskine had made sure that all his papers would reflect his true self rather than the mistake of his birth, he’d sworn the truth was buried when he put him in that contraption and shot him full of serum and rayons. It should have stayed buried, especially after he’d essentially died in the Ice. Sure most of those aware of the Super Soldier Serum knew how weak and scrawny he’d once been, but this part of his past was so marked with confusion, fear and hatred, he’d gladly be dead rather than be reminded of it and the misery it brought his younger self and everyone around him.

He’d always been tight-lipped about his past, even to people like Peggy, who he’d respected and then foolishly fell in love with. But he had treated his sex-change has if it never happened and had always preferred to ignore it rather than be reminded of it. And yet somehow, it had all been for nothing, and now Fury had the galls to dangle those informations in front of him like a rotten carrot to insure his obedience. It leaves a sour taste in his mouth and a heavy weight in his stomach.

If the spy was able to dig that up, someone else would do it too someday and would be able to use it in much the same way as Fury was, or threaten to prove that the American Icon everyone still seems to love even sixty years later had actually been a deviant freak. Steve entertains the fantasy of it not shocking anyone, for just a second, before ruthlessly squashing his flight of fancy. From what he’s seen so far, the world hasn’t changed that much, apart from being all around louder, so getting his hopes up would amount to nothing.

Suddenly feeling tired down to his bones, Steve lays back on the bed and falls into an uneasy slumber.

 

* * *

 

 

The next week passes him by like a bad dream. His mind always reeling over the “crash courses” Agent Sitwell and Brooks give him. The glorious deeds of Martin Luther King Jr., the assassination of J.F.Kennedy, the landing on the Moon, the Watergate Scandal, the Cold War, the Vietnam War, the more recent events like 9/11 (so many lives forsaken for the sake of another madman twisting religions and minds) or the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, the induction of the first black (African American is the “PC” term these days though) President of the United States. So many things have changed and yet so few. In his most cynical moments, laying down on the bunk in the quarters he’d been allotted, alone with only the darkness and his own thoughts, he muses that it will always be the same. Man killing man, and lives cut way too short. And here he’d been hoping for flying cars.

Before he knows it, Agent Brooks is driving him to his S.H.I.E.L.D. appointed flat in upper Brooklyn. It’s a small, bland, little apartment two doors down from a 24/7 Mixed-Martial Arts club. He ends up spending more time in the club, bludgeoning sandbags or out on the streets, taking in the changes on some of his old haunts, than he does at his place. Day and night, he walks around, just watching. It makes him both so very sad and so immensely angry to see all the things that changed.

On his fifth day out of S.H.I.E.L.D. HQ, he takes a trip to Central Park, but is waylaid by a small arts and craft shop near the park, from where he comes out looking disbelievingly at the 200 crayons box he’s just purchased but happy to have at least one thing he’s sure to know, back with him (not really, there’s so many colors he’s never even heard off, the boxes have changed too and the texture of the crayons, it looks nearly the same but not really, because sixty years have gone by and he wasn’t there…). He spends the remainder of the day sitting on the grass, just enjoying the crispy feeling of autumn and the fiery colors of dying leaves as he observes and sketches the park-goers moving about. Some are running in frankly too tight outfits (which is a laugh really because God knows his old movie uniform left very few things to imagination), some are just walking, chatting away, playing with dogs, with frisbees or strange dart-like balls the size of his fist.

His eyes take everything in and he wonders about the vagaries of time, when he trails off and then does a double-take on a couple walking on the other side of the clearing. They’re walking side by side, an arm around each other’s waist, heads bent together and talking softly in such an intimate gesture it makes his heart constrict a little. But really what grabbed his attention was something else. That something being the fact that their apparent heights and built and the cut of their clothes shows something that should have made both these people very cautious to display their love so freely. Because they are both quite clearly male.

Steve’s eyes dart around, trying to assess if they were at any risk of being accosted by anyone that he should help them with; but no one so much as looks their way, apart from a quick look or two. And no one had the look of instant hatred he’d witnessed sometimes when something didn’t agree with someone’s view of the world. It’s like they are just any young lovey-dovey couple on the street. Wonder and fear for the couple makes him follow, some distances away, as they leave the park.

They meet with other people, straight or even queers like them, who look as confidant about their right to flaunt their love as the two from the park.

Steve has keen eyes, so when the twenty-something kid comes up to chat with the couple, he has no problems distinguishing the slightly angular jaw hiding the last remnants of a rounder, softer face, and the folds of a shirt hiding compression bandages. So he drinks the sight in, because this child, who’s laughing gaily and fiddles around on his cellphone, he’s like him. He knows it. Sees it in the slightly too wide stance to accommodate a member that should be there yet is not but probably mimicked by some socks in a bundle, the itch of those shoulders as he moves in a small way to unbunch part of his bandages discreetly.

He stands for what feels like an eternity, just watching the young man interacting with those other people, with ease and nonchalance he would have never been able to fake, back when he was on the last dregs of his surgeries, when the testosterone mix was so experimental he’d been little more than a human test subject, and left him with damaged lungs and an immune system shot to hell. This young boy looks so healthy it makes Steve’s eyes water slightly, in happiness or in bitterness, he’s not quite sure. Breaking out of the painful memories, Steve takes the subway back to Brooklyn, his emotions in a knot and his mind reeling. Apparently, S.H.I.E.L.D.'s crash course had been sorely lacking and he has a lot of research to do.

 

* * *

 

Once in Brooklyn, it takes him an hour and a half to find the public library he used to go to as a child, the streets were the same but the shops and buildings were all different and confusing, but it’s nearly the same as it used to be. Newer bookcases and different faces at the desks but it held the same air of quiet contemplation he’d sought so many times in his younger years.

He quietly asks the young, timid looking, clerk at the counter for informations on sex-changes and homosexuals and gets a slightly bewildered look in return. But the young woman shuffles him off to a single bookcase, near the back, and shows him some books before leaving him alone. Confronted with so many books with improbable titles and references, Steve can feel a slight headache developing behind his eyes and sighs in defeat. This was too important for him to pass it by, so he soldiers on and open a book.

He’d been sitting there for five minutes, just starting the introductory chapter of a book called “In A Queer Time: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives” when the clerk comes back, looking hesitant and unsure. The blond man gives her his best unthreatening smile and she seems to straighten her spine and strides toward him with determination. He’s slightly startled when he realizes that she’s holding a slip of paper in her hand and when she brandishes it right in his face.

 

“I’m sorry, what?” He blusters, looking from the note held in her hand to the young clerk’s face which is going through several shades of red as she cocked her head to try and hide her reddenning face behind her fringe.

“You’ll probably find more informations there…” The girl answers, faltering slightly when he doesn’t move to take the note. “It’s… uhm… it’s the address and number for the local PFLAG chapter.”

“I… thank you…” Steve smiles weakly, trying not to show his complete cluelessness, while taking the note carefully.

“It’s okay. I know it can be a bit confusing but I’m sure the people there will know how to answer any question you have.” The young woman babbles, reddening even more before turning around and positively fleeing him.

 

Steve spends a long time staring at the note with a simple address and a phone number written on it, before shaking his head and deciding to put it at the back of his mind for a while. After all, he still has some research to do in here before he can run off to find this “PFLAG” place.

He’s been reading quietly for a while when the young clerk comes back to tell him that the library is about to close. Surprised at the extent of his concentration, he looks quickly at his watch to realize that yes, it’s way past 8pm and he’s been sitting here for nearly two hours. Straightening up, he decides to check out a couple of books that seem to hold the most relevant informations he needs, and treks back to his SHIELD appointed flat with the books under his arm.

 

* * *

 

The serum makes it hard for him to sleep longer than four hours, even after having demolished a couple of sandbags down at the gym well past midnight. After a few hours of shut-eye, he spends a lot of time just reading through the books he’s found or staring at the clerk’s note, committing the address to memory as well as the handwriting. What he’s found so far is both interesting, deeply saddening and still so much more than he ever thought he’d know about himself and about society and how far it’s come while still seemingly staggering along.

It takes him a whole week before Steve gathers enough courage to ditch his very covert S.H.I.E.L.D. tail (one in a jogging suit who somehow always ended up in the vicinity of anywhere he’d sit when walking in the city, and one fake mother with a child who never checked her child and never held them out of their pram, not even once in over 3 hours she’d been sitting close by him, reading at the café down the street). After about half an hour of walking aimlessly, he finally makes his way to the address the clerk had given him.

It’s an imposing building, the “PFLAG” office apparently shares floors with a law firm and a few other administrative offices, but the soldier barely glances at the other names before locking on the rainbow colored words on the ceramic plaque in the lobby. Following the instructions to the elevator, he entered just as a smooth soprano called out from the revolving doors of the building.

 

“Oh crap! Please hold the elevator! Please! Please! Please!”

 

Nobody would ever say that his Mama hadn’t raised him with manners, so he immediately puts his hand between the closing doors, blocking them long enough for the person on the other side of the lobby to run to him in a clatter of booted feet.

 

“Thank you so much, I really thought you wouldn’t do anything and I’d have to wait for another twenty minutes before the lift came back!” The whirlwind of colors sighs, quickly stepping into the elevator with him.

 

The blond man answers with a polite smile and can’t help but scrutinize his lift companion from the corner of his eye as the other quickly pushes the button the Captain had been about to push when interrupted. With his short stature, stocky features and deep scarlet hair cut in a very unique style (it’s the first time Steve sees a man with hair shaved from the sides of his head and flowing unrestrained from the top of his head, just like the Indian warriors in the comics he used to share with Bucky), the younger man (a teenager really) with him is perhaps the most glaring proof that Steve is not in Kansas anymore, Toto. But it somehow just strengthens the soldier’s determination to get more information about what could be happening in this new millennium for people like him, if a young black man like this one can so freely chose and change his appearance so completely.

The rest of the trip up to the tenth’s floor is done in complete silence, apart from the inane music creaking through the lift’s speakers. Steve’s eyes are riveted on the metal surface in front of his eyes, his thoughts drifting far away to other times and other people long gone, so much so that he does not realize they’re there until the younger man clears his throat noisily, making him jump slightly out of his reverie.

He walks out of the elevator a few steps behind the younger man and stopped abruptly when said teenager stopped in the middle of the corridor before spinning around to pin him with a critical look.

 

“Look, honey, you look like you could use a hug or a pamphlet about why your wee-wee’s being all bothered by what you see in the locker room.” The young man intoned, a half-smirk burgeoning on his face.

 

Steve feels his face and neck burning as he deciphers the words thrown at him and can’t help the stuttering coming out unwillingly.

 

“I… no… I mean…”

“Aw, I’m just playing, boo.” The young black man chuckles, crossing his arms on his chest and looking him over, causing him to blush even harder. “But you do look like you’re not even sure if you’re in the right country anymore, though. With the amount of time I spend lazing around here, I think I can help you out. So go on, hit me with your best shot.”

 

Slightly phased by the strange colloquialism, Steve reviews the sentence a little in his mind before blinking.

 

“Really? That would be swell… I mean nice.”

“Look at you, all polite and stuff. I’m a monster of rudeness compared to you, my hunky blond friend. I’m Randall, permanent fixture at the Brooklyn PFLAG chapter.”

 

Feeling a bit winded by the constant chatter and cheery attitude directed at him after weeks of no-nonsense impassibility from S.H.I.E.L.D., the augmented soldier shakes Randall’s hand a bit shakily as the younger man blinds him with his broadest smile.

 

“I’m Steve, I have been… away… for a while.” He answers, feeling a whirlwind of guilt, sorrow, hope, excitement, spinning in his mind, making him feel a bit heady.

 

He still sees clear as day when Randall’s broad smile dims minutely, as if aware of the conflicting emotions warring in him.

 

“So, Steve, what did you want to know? I can direct you to the correct pamphlets if you need help navigating the great seas of queerness.” The black teenager wiggles his eyebrows at him, making him chuckle weakly.

“I… have been away from the Western world for a while.” Steve starts, the half-truths feeling odd on his tongue. “And I was never good at keeping up to date about things. But now I’m back and I’ve seen people being different and still managing to be happy and… d’you think you could… point me to the documentation about transsexuality..?”

 

As he speaks, the soldier knows his semi-lies are nearly laughable, and he sees how the younger man’s gaze turns sharp and inquisitive, making him hesitate between straightening his spine and shrink onto himself. He finally decides to straighten his spine and to return the teenager’s gaze with the same intensity.

Randall’s stare mellows slightly and he gives him another, smaller smile.

 

“You know, if you want to know about a more genuine day-to-day experience of being trans, I’ve been on testosterone shots for 8 months now, and I love the change it’s brought into my life and I love to talk about the experience at a whole.” The teenager says softly, looking down at his own chest. “I wish I had realized when I was a bit younger though, I spent a long time being an absolute angst-ridden little entitled chucklehead because I didn’t understand what I was feeling or how I could take steps to change the way I felt.”

 

Steve’s voice catches into his throat and his eyes sting a little as he drinks in the younger man’s shape once again, this time denoting the slight give aways that escaped him, in his fascination for Randall’s hair. He smiles waveringly at the young man and clears his throat before answering.

 

“I just want to be a little more informed about things, I guess.” The blond man replies, rubbing a hand against the back of his neck. “The place I was in was really remote and nothing new ever happened. Being in New York is a real challenge.”

“I bet.“ Randall nods, before looking around them with amusement. “Oh man, we’ve just been standing around here like a couple of idiots, come on, I’ll show you the pamphlets and books you can loan.”

 

That said, he starts walking down the corridor and the blond man follows him, feeling wonder and some crushing relief at having found someone he could relate to on some level, in this world he was still such a stranger to.

Before he’s even realized it, the National Icon is sitting at the terrace of a café, a book and a handful on pamphlets under his arm, and Randall sitting opposite to him and ordering two “triple half-caf cappuccinos with hazelnut sprinkles”, whatever that is.

 

“So, Steve, what do you actually do?” Randall asks, smiling at the blond man.

“I’m… I’m in the Army. I’m a reservist.” Steve replies, wincing mentally at the amount of half-truths he’s had to give his new acquaintance in such a short time. “What about you? You seem a bit, uhm young, to be out of school by 10am.”

 

The blond soldier lets his eyes trail significantly at his wristwatch before going back to the teenager, who winces slightly and keeps his gaze away from the taller man.

 

“Highschool kids are bullying ignoramuses who would hate the moon if someone told them it wasn’t attached to the Earth.” Randall sneers, with anger as the barista brings their drinks.

 

The younger man takes a long moment, just cupping his coffee and losing his gaze into the steamy cup of caffeine in front of him. Steve himself just tries not to look too dubiously at the frothy concoction. Something must have gone past his neutral exterior because the wild haired teen giggled softly.

 

“It’s not going to bite you yenno. It’s like it’s the first time you’ve ever seen a frothy cappuccino of your life.” Randall smiles amusedly.

“Well, there isn’t that many choice of drinks on base and I’ve lived in and around bases for what feels like a long time.” Steve replies, twisting the truth with a slight wince.

 

* * *

 

The two talk for a while, of pretty safe subjects all in all. At least as far as Steve is concerned. They mostly talk about New York, Randall giving him tips on where to go to get a good burger and pretty much treating him like a tourist, which amuses the Soldier slightly. And after a cappuccino and a black coffee respectively, they end up back on the subject of the teen’s school and the boy admitts with a neutral tone that his presence isn’t always accepted in school.

 

“But I like the school though. Their science program is pretty okay. I’m there to learn. As long as I’m not treated like an idiot, I won’t return the favor.” Randall scoffs, shrugging his shoulders moodily. “At least, because noone at school has my phone number, that one less way for them to bully me.”

 

That last sentence is said so softly, it’s only Steve’s hyper developed hearing which gives him the chance to hear him. The super soldier frowns at that statement but he’s only just met the younger man, what can he do beside being supportive and maybe drop by the school to see if he can be of more help. He chastises himself as soon as the thought pops up. He is a World War II National Icon out of his own time, what good could he do?

He’s startled out of his self-inflicted sorrow  by a kick against his leg. When he looks back up, his young acquaintance is looking at him with amusement, worry and a bit of understanding.

 

“Went away for a while, there.” The young black teen smiles good-naturedly.

“I’m sorry.” Steve sighs a bit embarrassed, straightening his spine from the hunched position he’d unconsciously adopted.

“It’s alright.” The teen shrugs. “You seem to have a lot on your mind.”

 

Steve opens his mouth to apologise again but is interrupted by a loud melody of some kind (the music of this century was still a bit alien to him). Randall startles loudly and fishes out his cellphone again.

 

“Uh oh. My mom used my full name and she actually texted me. She never texts me. I think I might be looking at 20 to life of no phone, no tv and no internet.” The boy pouts. “Well, Stevie-honey, looks like I’m out. Gotta get home before she decides on the sentence for skipping school on a Tuesday.”

“Oh… of course.” The Captain agrees, half-sheepish, half-disappointed.

“Aw, don’t be blue, boo, here.” The boy smiles gaily, grabbing his arm and producing a marker from somewhere. “You call me? We need to do this again. I’ll pay next time. Bye friend.”

 

Before the tall blond can respond, Randall is up, leaving a resounding kiss on his cheek before leaving with one last wave at him. Steve reflexively raises his arm to wave back, and realizes that the teen has written something on his forearm. Looking down, he can’t repress the slight smile that break on his face as he tentatively recognizes the series of numbers as a cellphone number followed under it by the inscription “Randall, the one and only flamboyant trans guy you know”.

Leaning back against his chair, feeling lighter than he perhaps has felt since waking up so many years out of track, Steve Rogers looks down at his black coffee, his large hands warming up against the cup as he can still manage to see the black lines along his forearm, making something warm and gentle rise up in his chest. Friend, uh…

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Again, please let me know if you think anything should be corrected. Hope you enjoyed it.
> 
> The second installement of the series will probably take a while to come up. It's gonna be set in the 40s' and centered around Steve and Erskine.


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